Then nothing to do but “Oof!” – daemon or Power or not. Oof is an active verb, all about impact. Flesh and bone, decelerating hard. From 32 fps squared to nothing, in nothing flat. Hope not to be
too
flat.
Then nothing to do but ride that impact, roll with it, spend a little of that vicious energy in movement.
More of it had gone straight into the floor. I’d never broken parquet before; I hadn’t known that thick wooden blocks could splinter.
Having an Aspect doesn’t give me a soft landing, it doesn’t give me anything soft. I hit just as hard as anyone; just then, as hard as Jacey. It’s not that I don’t feel it, it’s just that I don’t break.
Not as easily, at any rate. Little bits of me still break under sufficient provocation, blood vessels and such. I was going to be bruised, come morning.
It would have been totally mean of me to hope that the same was true of Jacey.
Totally mean.
So of course I didn’t do that.
Of course not.
No.
I rolled to my feet and never mind the ouchie in my back, I wasn’t going to show him that. Really I should have checked for the enemy first – it’s a bad combat move to worry about your wounded before you know for sure you won’t be joining them – but I did just glance aside, just to make sure Jacey wasn’t lying broken on the floor there, all our guesses wrong.
Not he. He was coming easy to his feet, much as I was. Looking round, much as I was, rather than looking up. Just to be sure of me.
I frowned at him for being frivolous, and lifted my head ostentatiously.
Crows are bright birds, they learn fast. I’d hoped to see a figure of shadow and bulk flowing down the long turns of the stairs, quicker than any real man reasonably might. Instead, here came a shadow of birds, enough to darken that whole high hallway: hurtling down at us, seeming faster even than we had been. Is it possible to fly faster than you can fall? I don’t know, my physics doesn’t stretch so far.
But here they came, diving like cormorants, right for us. Crows love eyeballs, and I’d never wished my Aspect to be more like a coat that I could wrap around my head for cover, and it had never felt less like that. Nothing was going to save my eyes unless I did it my own self, swift and aggressive and hyper-aware.
Which is actually what the Aspect is really all about. What it’s for, pretty much. It didn’t really settle in on my shoulders with a happy sigh,
now you’re talking
, but it did sort of feel that way as the first crow-missile reached me and my hand batted it aside.
I could write a list – actually, I think I am writing a list – of all the things an Aspect doesn’t feel like or act like. Sometimes I used to think that what I really needed was another list for the thing itself to read, telling it all the things it really wasn’t despite whatever it thought or wanted to be.
Except that of course it couldn’t read, because it really wasn’t aware. Certainly not self-aware.
Certainly not
enjoying
itself as we played crazy-cricket in the hall there, birds coming at us from any angle, both my hands independently deadly as I dashed them to the floor or swatted them into walls and pillars and newel-posts. If one of those birds had got through, I could have been in trouble; two could have finished me, one eye each. But I could, just about, handle this. Moment by moment, bird by bird.
By definition, if they wanted my eyes, they had to come where I could see them. That helped. The ones that attacked me from behind, that battered my head with their wings or tangled in my hair to peck and scratch at my scalp, I pretty much ignored. There wasn’t too much damage they could do back there. It did hurt but only distantly, folded away, to be considered later. I worried more that they might think to coalesce into a man again behind my back, where I wouldn’t see until he was manifest and deadly.
Which gave me the excuse I needed – no, the good military tactical reason – to check on Jacey and how he was doing. Peripherally, I was aware that he was on his feet and hurling crows around, much as I was; we weren’t exactly tag-teaming, but every now and then one of his came my way, and vice versa. I didn’t really need to concern myself with his, post-Jacey; they weren’t up to much. And vice, I hoped, versa.
Still, I stole a better look in the first instant I could afford to – and nearly lost an eye but not quite, just snared the vicious thing in the air a moment before its kamikaze plunge could drive its beak deep into my skull – and saw him carving birds out of the air with a banister-post that he must have kicked out from under the graceful curving rail. With that in his hands he really did look like a cricketer, elegant in motion, lethal in contact.
“Wish I’d thought of that!” I yelled, between blows. And then, “Back to back?”
“Right.”
The fighting had drawn us apart, more or less unheeding; now, deliberately, we drew back together, slaughtering as we went. The floor was deep in feathers and corpses now; bird-bones crunched underboot for both of us.
“How the hell many more?” Jacey demanded, flailing away. It was mean of me to wish that he might sound at least a little breathless. So I didn’t, obviously.
“As many as they can recruit, I think.” I wasn’t gasping at all. Of course not. “All the crows in London, if they need ’em. I think they’re conscripts, not constituents.”
“How – no, never mind.” He was right; this really wasn’t the time to wonder how actual living birds could become part of some supernatural gestalt were-crow, in and out of form, an independent bird or a fragment of a human-seeming man, depending. “I don’t suppose we can really go on doing this for ever.”
“No.” Sooner or later, when we did inevitably get tired or careless or lose the light, one or another of those birds would get lucky. A beak would find an eye.
“We should move, then.”
“Yes.” So long as we stayed here, the Corbies could carry on funnelling a constant stream of crows through the broken pane overhead. “The stairs would be easier.” Birds could still come at us there, but only from one direction; we could spell each other, maybe even fetch some kind of help. I was slightly surprised that no one else had come up yet from the kitchens or the baths below. We were surely making noise enough to spur someone’s curiosity.
“Do you think this is all of them? Both of them?”
“I’m hoping so.” We’d only seen one human figure above – but I figured that if they could build themselves from birds, the Twa Corbies could build their twin selves into a single awesome man. Which was a neat trick, and maybe what they’d been doing before on the jib outside Jacey’s window, to make a body massive enough to walk in through his window.
Step by step, like some four-limbed crablike creature, we shuffled sideways towards the tight spiral staircase that would lead us back below. Birds molested us all the way, but Jacey’s batsmanship and my flying hands kept us safe until we reached the shelter of the stairhead.
More or less safe, and the approximate shelter. Jacey was bleeding from several gashes to his fingers, where they peeped from the sleeves of that heavy flying jacket. My hands were okay, but I could feel trickles of blood meandering across my scalp, ready to clot horribly among the roots. I still had one bloody bird knotted up in my hair; Jacey found the time to reach out a hand and yank it out.
That yanked enough hair with it to make me yelp. Which made us both grin, in the circumstances. He crushed it to rags of flesh and feather, dropped it on the stone steps, and for a little while we stood shoulder to shoulder just in the turn of the stair there, just far enough down that the birds couldn’t come at us from above, they had to funnel through the narrow doorway.
Where they met Jacey’s banister-post, which he handled like a quarterstaff now as there really wasn’t room to swing. I didn’t know he’d studied staff. I did know that there wouldn’t be room for two of us without my getting in his way, so I dropped down a couple of steps to give him space. Took a couple of seconds to watch, to be sure he knew what he was doing – which he did: either he was a natural or else he really had studied quarterstaff – and then I left him to it.
That was actually harder than pulling him over the gallery rail. Trust just doesn’t come easy, not to me.
Still watchful up the staircase just in case – what is it they say,
trust, but verify?
– I walked pretty much backwards down the steps into the loitering steam of the baths below.
A
ND LEARNED VERY
quickly why that’s always a bad idea, and why nobody had been coming up to see what all the noise was about.
Actually I knew already, that it was a bad idea. I’ve seen enough horror movies. When a character’s going one way but looking another, you just know they’re heading into trouble. Turns out that people do it anyway, despite all those movies. Despite their Aspect positively screaming at them, at least in so far as a mute insensate artefact can scream: which is not quite far enough, apparently.
I was warned, as I should have been. Distracted and anxious, I was just that little too slow to react, which I never should have been.
Though to be fair, he was bloody fast. And bloody quiet, that too.
There was blood in the steam. I could smell it now, too late. Now that his arm had closed around my throat, so that I couldn’t even yell a warning up the stairs to Jacey.
Damn, I was supposed to be better than this. Jacey could look after himself; I certainly couldn’t look after him without first doing the same thing, getting myself sorted. Breaking free of this chokehold. Basic stuff, except when the choke comes from something frail under your fingers and yet intolerably strong, like bones of slender steel wrapped in some cool matter that might look like flesh from a distance, at a glance, but really wasn’t to the touch. More like iron filings, when they cling to a magnet: individual shifting barbs making a stubborn whole, like uncounted birds joining into a man.
There was another smell to cloak the blood, more immediate, right there beneath my nose: a mustiness and a wildness together, the smell of a thousand nests of old dead twigs and moss and shed hair, fallen feathers, detritus.
How many Corbies make a man? Just the one, apparently, that we’d seen above. The other must have come in through the tunnels, he would never have survived the train; and he’d been waiting down here for exactly this, for exactly me.
As above, so below. One came as birds, one came as a man, both the same thing. Manageable to themselves. Jacey could manage the one, I thought, at least for now; this one was for me. There was no one here now who could manage him. Blood in the steam. Bodies that I didn’t want to look for.
Damn it, Reno! This place is meant to be safe, it’s why we come...
Too late to protest now. Everything’s unfair, and nothing is secure.
My fingers can punch through brick. This was bird-bone: impossibly dense, compounded of impossible numbers of birds, and even so.
It was like a steel bar across my throat, pressing hard enough to cut off air and blood together, and even so.
I still need air, but not that much, not right that moment; my blood still pumps around, but it’s... special. It works hard.
Just as well.
I set my legs, grounding myself as solidly as I could when I didn’t stand on solid ground, when my senses were catching echo or vibration or something to say that there was hollow tunnel underneath me. One of the other Tube lines, that must be; London’s clay is woven through with them, it’s like an ant-hill, like a hive, a three-dimensional city.
Then I bent and twisted, to hurl this bird-man over my shoulder and away.
Tried to.
He wasn’t shifting, as it turned out.
I thought I grew heavy, when my Aspect was upon me. I was nothing, a lightweight next to this guy. Next to this guy now. He’d been a featherweight before, when I’d hurled him off the towpath; how many birds had he filled up with, since then? He must have swallowed whole aviaries, whole species. Maybe he was the one I flung into the river; maybe he’d taken half the Thames on board for ballast, though it hadn’t washed away the smell of him. A thousand thousand nests, it might have been.
Whatever. I couldn’t budge him. Me with all my Aspect turned up to eleven.
He
laughed
at me, he did. In a bird-voice, a bird’s laugh, harsh and hollow. And then leaned close to my ear and made words with his troubled mouth, clashing his jaw on them as though he had a beak yet:
“Oz wants to talk to you.”
Six words, and they were an answer to all my questions of the day. Mine and Jacey’s too.
Actually, one word would have been enough. Just the name, one shrunken syllable, Oz: that’s plenty.
It stopped me fighting. Trying to fight. Stopped me dead, in my useless straining. Instead I stood very, very still. The Corbie laughed again, like a made man, like a gangster satisfied; and then I stamped.
Aspect up to eleven, I stamped. And stamped again, brought my foot crashing down in its good boot, again and again on that tiled floor.
Maybe understanding gave me a whole new notch on the dial, turned me all the way up to twelve.
I did not want to go and see Oz. No.
I stamped out the urgency of that, the fury and the fear all together; and the outrage too, that these damn birds should make themselves so free of our lives, our time, our choices. Jacey’s
home
, where I’d gone to be safe; here where I’d brought him, where we should both of us be safer...